Communities of Practice 101

The potential for communities of practice in an organization is enormous. But their success hinges on a wide range of factors - from readiness to structure, champions to members.

Find out the basic ingredients needed in setting up productive and sustainable communities of practice.

Highlights

CoPs are groups of like-minded, interacting people defined by what their community is about, how it functions, and what capabilities it produces.

The establishment of CoPs requires readiness in their host organization, sound structure, and the delivery of quick steps. Their management can usefully follow the 5D model: discover, dream, design, document, and disseminate.

To succeed, CoPs should monitor relevance and peformance in their domain, membership, norms and rules, structure and processes, flow of energy, results, resources, and values.

ADB encourages websites and blogs to link to its web pages. Articles may be republished without alteration with the attribution statement “This article was first published by the Asian Development Bank (www.adb.org)" and a clickable link back to adb.org.